1. Lifecycle Marketing

1. Lifecycle Marketing

Internet Lifecycle Marketing

Congrats! You have built your own website.

However, while doing so, you may realize you need visitors to your website, and it has been a lot harder to do so. With over 1 billion other websites vying for eyeballs in 2016, the internet space has gotten a lot more crowded.

In this course, you will learn the following:

How has the Internet revolutionized marketing?

The Typical Customer Lifecycle Marketing Funnel

The Perfect Customer Lifecycle Marketing Funnel

How has the internet revolutionized Marketing?

The Internet, through technology and analytics, has revolutionized our way of life and the way we market to consumers. Without the internet, we wouldn’t have websites, ecommerce, social media, or email marketing.

For successful online marketing, a marketer must have a loving marriage of marketing business know-how and internet technology.

The Typical Customer Lifecycle Marketing Funnel

So we all spend time generating interest about our company and products. We may do it online via Google or Facebook Advertising. We may also do this offline, through networking events or flyer distribution. The goal is really to generate interested prospects, who eventually become paying customers.

So, for example, you spend $1000 of ad budget on Facebook and 10 hours of your time setting up your campaign. This got you 100 email enquiries and after your sales process, 10 become paying customers.

Now, if you want to increase the paying customers from 10 to 20, you could take these actions:

Increase your advertising budget,

Increase the number of hours spent on promotion through social media, forums, email marketing, or anything else,

Or you could rework your sales process to improve your conversion rate.

Now, the typical customer lifecycle marketing funnel is not an ideal funnel design to grow your business today, because there are numerous holes in the funnel design.

What are these holes? There are 3 holes to take note.

1st Hole: Lost Traffic

Let me ask you something. How many visitors that came to your website this morning were ready to purchase from you, today? This might be a high percentage, even more so if your product/service is time-sensitive.

For example, a dating couple researching 1 year in advance on your property site will not purchase now or in the next 1 year, but they probably would the year after, once they get married.

So, what happens to all those who were not ready to buy from you … today? You would lose those leads forever. Why? Because we do not try to capture those leads. We do not give them enough reasons to engage with us. As a result, we lose them forever.

2nd Hole: Lost Leads

Let’s talk about those who were interested to engage with our sales process. Let us call them hot leads. Our focus is to convert those hot leads into buying customers and keep our business running. But, we also drive a certain group of people to our website who may not be ready to buy from us today.

In a typical customer lifecycle marketing funnel, we label them as bad leads and discard them.

But, not all of them are bad leads. There will definitely be some who will never engage with us, but many are simply not ready to buy from us today, but may in the future.

So, the problem is that we are labeling customers as “bad” leads as early as the first 1 to 2 interaction points. Leads are hemorrhaging out of your business as bad leads.

3rd Hole: Lost Customers

So, now, let us talk about the 3rd hole of the typical customer lifecycle marketing funnel.

We make the sales and then we think we did our job. Then, we rush back to the start of our sales funnel and spend money and time to bring new leads and funnel them in our sales process. While doing so, we forget about following up with our existing customers.

And, isn’t this highly unfortunate we had an existing paying customer with whom we spent all that energy and money attracting and closing, and then they just leave us, because we didn’t do a great job towow that customer?

We lost them because we were not good enough at up-selling them. We are not good enough to get referrals.

That is the 3rd hole of the typical customer lifecycle, which end up as lost customers.

The Perfect Customer Lifecycle Marketing Funnel

Instead of implementing the typical customer lifecycle marketing funnel, let us explain what the “perfect customer lifecycle” can do your business. In doing so, we will solve each of those three holes found in the typical customer lifecycle marketing funnel. One-by-one, we will explain how a perfect customer lifecycle marketing funnel will eliminate each of those holes.

3 Solutions to the 3 Holes of the Typical Customer Lifecycle Marketing Funnel

The Solution to Lost Traffic – Capture Leads

Attract Traffic: Similar to the typical customer lifecycle funnel, you need to generate traffic to your website. For digital products or services that would mean getting targeted traffic to your offers, through search engine optimization and/or PPC ads.

Capture Leads: Now, this is a unique characteristic of the Perfect Customer lifecycle that solves lost traffic. The objective is to use a lead magnet to capture the visitors’ contact details before they “bounce” off your site. This is typically in the form of offering attractive information or a promotion in exchange for their contact email.

Nurture Leads: While there will be leads that are bad and not your targeted customers, there will also be a significant group of customers, who are good, but not ready yet.
Instead of discarding them, they are now transferred to a “Long-Term Nurturing” email group, where you can provide meaningful information sharing, perhaps, once a month to maintain the relationship.
The series of emails you send to the long- term nurturing group is typically also called an “Email Drip.” You can see examples below:

For example, Ramit Sethi sells online courses to people looking to build success in their personal finance, careers, or online business. With multiple courses, he has a lot of opportunities for cross-selling.

One way he delivers these offers is immediately after a customer success milestone.

Once a customer completes one of Ramit’s courses, they might receive an email that looks like this:

The Wow phase is the extra step we take that is beyond the normal call of duty for the customer, i.e., anything else we do post-sale that will make them go “WOW!”

Get Referral – When you have made sure your customers are very satisfied using your products or services, it is probably the right time to get them to refer your system to their connections. To get more referrals, you simply ask them to refer your services to their network, who might be interested in purchasing similar solutions. You can even provide your customers with an incentive by offering more WOWs, for example, offering them free support, giving them off 1 month of free subscription, or giving them a free upgrade.

In the marketing industry, we call this word-of-mouth marketing, and it works pretty simply: According toNielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising or marketing. It is that simple!

Conclusion

At this point, you understand the basic design in building your lifecyle marketing funnel. We would also recommend you look at our email marketing platform, which can help you capture leads, run an email drip, and upsell email campaign.

In the next chapter, we will cover how to generate traffic to your marketing funnel through social media marketing.